How To Crawl a Site with Scrapy in April, 2024
Whether you are looking to obtain data from a website, track changes on the internet, or use a website API, website crawlers are a great way to get the data you need. While they have many components, crawlers fundamentally use a simple process: download the raw data, process and extract it, and, if desired, store the data in a file or database. There are many ways to do this, and many languages you can build your spider or crawler in.
Scrapy is a Python framework for building website crawlers. Scapy provides many of the functions required for downloading websites and other content on the internet, making the development process quicker and less programming-intensive. These tutorials use custom Python scripts in conjunction with Scrapy to build crawlers and web spiders.
Web Scraping with Scrapy: Python Tutorial
This tutorial examines how to install and use Scrapy to crawl an example bookstore on a sample site. It’s well presented and also includes how to export the data.
Making Web Crawlers Using Scrapy for Python
This tutorial guides you through the process of building a web scraper for AliExpress.com. It also provides a comparison between Scrapy and BeautifulSoup.
The tutorial includes step-by-step instructions for installing Scrapy, using the Scrapy Shell to test assumptions about website behavior, and using CSS selectors and XPath for data extraction.
The tutorial concludes with a demonstration of how to create a custom spider for a Scrapy project to scrape data from AliExpress.com.
How To Crawl A Web Page with Scrapy and Python 3
This tutorial by Justin Duke on the Digital Ocean community section gives a tutorial on how to extract quotes from a webpage using the Scrapy library.
Scraping Web Pages with Scrapy – Michael Herman
This is a tutorial posted by Michael Herman about crawling web pages with Scrapy using Python using the Scrapy library. This include code for the central item class, the spider code that performs the downloading, and about storing the data once is obtained.
Build a Python Web Crawler with Scrapy – DevX
This is a tutorial made by Alessandro Zanni on how to build a Python-based web crawler using the Scrapy library. This includes describing the tools that are needed, the installation process for python, and scraper code, and the testing portion.
Scrapy Tutorial — Scrapy Documentation
This is an official tutorial for building a web crawler using the Scrapy library, written in Python. The tutorial walks through the tasks of: creating a project, defining the item for the class holding the Scrapy object, and writing a spider including downloading pages, extracting information, and storing it.
Web Scraping with Scrapy and MongoDB – Real Python
This is a tutorial published on Real Python about building a web crawler using Python, Scrapy, and MongoDB. This provides instruction on installing the Scrapy library and PyMongo for use with the MongoDB database; creating the spider; extracting the data; and storing the data in the MongoDB database.
Web Scraping with Scrapy and MongoDB Part 2 – Real Python
This is a tutorial published on Real Python is a continuation of their previous tutorial on using Python, Scrapy, and MongoDB. It includes additional features including a download delay (very important).
A quick introduction to web crawling using Scrapy
This is a tutorial made by Xiaohan Zeng about building a website crawler using Python and the Scrapy library. This include steps for installation, initializing the Scrapy project, defining the data structure for temporarily storing the extracted data, defining the crawler object, and crawling the web and storing the data in JSON files.
Installing and using Scrapy web crawler to search text on multiple sites
This is a tutorial about using the Scrapy library to build a Python-based web crawler. This include code for generating a new Scrapy project and a simple sample Python crawler calling functions from the Scrapy library.
Scraping iTunes Charts Using Scrapy Python
This is a tutorial made by Virendra Rajput about the building a Python-based data scraper using the Scrapy library. This include instructions for the installation of scrapy and code for building the crawler to extract iTunes charts data and store it using JSON.
Scrapy-Cluster
Scrapy-cluster is a Scrapy-based project, written in Python, for distributing Scrapy crawlers across a cluster of computers. It combines Scrapy for performing the crawling, as well as Kafka Monitor and Redis Monitor for cluster gateway/management. It was released as part of the DARPA Memex program for search engine development.
Quick and Dirty Web Crawling with ScraPy
This is a tutorial posted by Sujit Pal about building a Python web crawler with the help of the Scrapy library.. This include instruction for installing Scrapy and code for building the spider.